How do I go about hiring someone for SEO and not ending up wasting money?
I have a long-running forum that is well-established. But over the past several years it has been getting pages dropped out of Google index. And search engine traffic has declined greatly.
So I realize I need professional help.
I looked around and contacted some SEO specialists. But it always ends up falling in one of two scenarios.
The first one is "packages". Where they just offer you 2-3 options that amount to "pay us $x and you'll be getting xyz". With xyz sometimes not even making sense in my situation. Like, twice I was offered "article package".... for a forum. Hello, I have content, users are posting it daily, the lack of content isn't the problem, everything else is. They don't even try to understand the problem I'm outlining, but simply offer one of their available "packages".
The second scenario is usually "pay us for an audit and then we'll go from there". Or alternatively, "we'll give you a free audit and then we'll offer you a package". With the result of such audit being something like this "you need to change your headlines to h1". Hello, those are forum threads, and like with most forum layouts, the thread headline shown on the page is identical to the content of the title tag of that same page. Which means enclosing that same content in h1 won't help rank better for that particular phrase. Not to mention my problem isn't ranking, it's lack of index.
Or, their audit result is "you need to remove ads. they increase load time and page shift so you need to remove them." That might be true, but that's what monetizes the website. Without the ads, none of the SEO would even be worth it. So thanks for the advice you know I can't use.
In all scenarios, they don't seem to care to even try to understand the problem. They just go through their checklist (including the h1 stuff I mentioned) and offer a "package".
How would I go about finding someone who would actually take the time to understand the problem?
Back in the day, I was doing all this myself. (We are talking 2002-2003, hanging out at WebmasterWorld, etc.) But now, I'm hopelessly outdated and I can't spend the time to educate myself as I have other aspects of the business to worry about.
How do people do go about getting some legitimate SEO help and not a gimmick or some "package"?
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from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/mkmctb/how_to_go_about_seo_audit_hiring_an_seo/>
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